The Chase

by Candice Fox

  ‘I have been able to inspire others,’ Schmitz continued cautiously. ‘Recruit a new generation of soldiers. But this will be bigger. And I assure you, this is going to make its mark. Your actions will make their mark.’

  Lightning Strike and a small woman standing with him high-fived.

  ‘Your role in this won’t be mistaken,’ Schmitz said, looking Reiter over. ‘We’re planning on making things as convincing as we can. We think your body, left at the scene, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head is going to get some people nodding along. We think a manifesto, handwritten by you, mailed to the New York Times on the evening of the massacre, is going to sew things up very neatly.’

  ‘You kidding me?’ Reiter snorted. ‘How the hell you going to get me to hand-write anything? You give me a pencil and I’ll stab you in the eye with it, you stupid motherfucker.’

  ‘I really doubt that,’ Schmitz said. He nodded at one of the men in the room, a lean, tattooed guy with jet-black hair and a goatee. The goateed guy took a pair of pliers out of his left back pocket and a pencil out of the right. Reiter gripped the chain between his wrists and looked at the faces around him, trying to find a friendly eye among them, but all he could see was the bored gazes of cats trying to think of new ways to play with their trapped mouse.

  ‘Which is it?’ Schmitz asked Reiter. ‘The pencil or the pliers?’

  For a few seconds of sheer, electric panic, Kradle simply tugged on the chain connecting him to the dead man. He pushed his cuff against his wrist with all his might, grabbed Homer’s and did the same. He got up, yanked hard, felt the impossible weight of the killer’s body anchor him to the kitchen floor. The sirens in the street were getting louder. He heard people yelling.

  His senses came to him in a painful whump, knocking clarity into his brain. This was his second chance. Two police officers had died trying to contain him, and he was still free. If he was captured now, all that lay ahead was the story that had been written for him; of a quiet death behind a sheet of one-way glass, maybe with Christine and Audrey’s parents watching, crying, whispering abuse from the darkened viewing room. John Kradle wanted to die where he had been happiest – under a Louisiana sunset on the swamps. He leaped onto the body of the officer who had restrained him and started fishing in the pockets of his shirt and trousers, his shaking fingers pulling at pouches on his belt.

  He heard a noise, looked over, and found Shelley Frapport was desperately searching the body of the officer named Reed. The black dog was dancing around madly, trying to console the boy under the table, trying to attack the fallen body of Reed, grabbing her sleeve and tugging, letting go, the animal utterly confused by the situation and which people belonged to which team. It realised its only known friend, Kradle, was searching for something and decided to help, snuffling and pawing at the pockets Kradle searched, trying to nose the man out of the way.

  ‘There’s no key!’ Kradle cried.

  Shelley was shaking her head madly. ‘It’s not here either.’

  Kradle made a decision. He wrenched the knife out of Homer’s chest. It came out slickly, soundlessly, trailing blood. Kradle wiped it on his jeans.

  Shelley looked at the knife and nodded her understanding. ‘I’ll try to hold them off. You head out the back. Take the car. The keys are hanging on the hook by the door. It’s parked in the alley.’

  ‘Take the kid,’ Kradle said. Shelley gathered up her bug-eyed, trembling son and all but dragged him out of the room. The sirens were deafening now. Kradle took Homer’s still warm hand in his, gritted his teeth, and set the blade to his unfeeling skin.

  The last time Old Axe had been inside Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Boulevard, he’d been twenty-eight years old, sporting a nose ring and wearing a necktie he’d swiped from his father’s dresser drawer tied around his forehead to keep his long hair back. The Whisk wasn’t a place he’d tended to go – he was more of a Pandora’s Box man when he wanted a crowd, but he’d followed the horde down to the rock club when he heard there was a protest kicking off. A young Axe had liked a protest, and at that time in his life there had been many, and he had known from the heat of that afternoon that this would be a goody. People jostling together, chest to back, hips to butts, yelling and spitting and rushing the police. Sweat. It had made him feel as if he were part of a living organism; a hot-blooded snake coiling and striking, and he was a guy who didn’t feel part of things very often. He remembered that night the upset had been about curfews at the Whisk or something like that. All he could remember now was that he’d taken an egg from a carton a guy was carrying around, hurled it and hit a line cop right in the face, and a guy wearing pigtails, with SLUT! painted across his bare chest, had burst out laughing at the accuracy of his shot. He was thinking about that guy now as he put a shoulder into the door of the club, a heavy thing that got stuck in the heat from too many layers of black paint over the years.

  It was cool inside, and nothing but the structure of the place seemed the same to Axe. There was the old scaffolding the dancers and bands had been forced to scale above the writhing masses, and the big dusty lights hanging precariously from rusty framework above that. The floor was still tacky, but where it met the bar it was littered with used electronic cigarettes and not the stubs of hand-rolled joints and peanut shells like he remembered. He didn’t recognise the names of any of the bands that were going to perform there over the coming weeks, and half of the signed posters hanging in frames behind the bar were mysteries to him, too.

  He put his policeman’s cap on the bar and pulled himself onto a stool. Midday. The Whisk was quiet. The bartender, who was probably born about half a century after the Whisky a Go Go opened its doors, came and looked at the badge on Axe’s shirt.

  ‘Nawlet,’ she read.

  ‘Yep,’ Axe lied.

  ‘Should you be drinkin’ in uniform, Officer Nawlet?’ she asked.

  ‘All I want is a Coke,’ Axe reasoned.

  The girl made him the drink and put a lemon slice in it, for some reason, and a fancy coaster underneath it. Axe opened his emu-skin wallet and pulled a note from a thick stack, paid her. He was following this girl with his eyes while she was stacking glasses on a high shelf when the older couple walked in and set their bags on the floor.

  He was tall, grey-haired, pear-shaped, and she was his short carbon-copy in chinos and sneakers. Sensible haircuts that fit nicely under sunhats. They clambered onto the stools two down from Axe, and he admired the gold-rimmed reading glasses the guy had hanging from a chain around his neck. Axe had been wearing tamper-proof plastic reading glasses at Pronghorn for some years, and his record for days between the prison issuing him a new pair and somebody chewing on them or sitting on them and snapping them in half just for the hell of it was only about two and a half weeks.

  Axe felt a little tingle of energy in his bones when the couple started speaking in German. He’d taken some German classes as a young man, when he was locked up for the first time, and as he listened some ancient, creaky door of his brain popped open and began interpreting the sounds.

  ‘All right, let’s take stock for a moment. Did you give the hotel key back or did I?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And where’s my puffer?’

  ‘In your pocket, there.’

  ‘I’ve got my passport . . .’

  Axe glanced over, saw the guy slap a blood-coloured booklet with gold lettering on the bar top, flip it over as though he wanted to check it wasn’t a forgery, then slip it back into a kind of cash-hiding fanny pack strapped to his waist under his T-shirt. The German lady was patting the pockets of her chinos, searching the zippered pockets of a similar nervous-tourist-style cash belt.

  ‘It’s . . .’ she murmured, trailing off.

  ‘Where is it?’ the guy demanded. ‘Did you leave it in the room?’

  ‘I brought it from the room. I know I did. It was the first thing I packed!’

  ‘Well, where is it?’

  ‘I, uh . . .’ The
woman’s face was flushing pink.

  ‘Jutta, don’t tell me you’ve lost it. We – we have half an hour until we have to leave!’

  The couple started attacking their bags, ripping open zippers and making velcro flaps roar. Axe sipped his drink. It was while he was turning back to the bar that he saw the door to the Whisky a Go Go shunt open again, a guy muscling a crate of wine bottles through. He noticed a shape in the light reflecting off the shiny floor and put his drink down, turned around and looked behind him.

  ‘Ent . . .’ Axe said clumsily. The German couple kept searching their bags. Axe thought for a moment.

  ‘Entschuldigung?’ he said. Excuse me?

  They looked up. Axe nodded to the doorway, the passport on the floor.

  The German man strode over and snatched up the passport.

  ‘Oh, thank god, thank god.’ He shoved the passport at his wife. ‘Thank god. Thank you, officer.’

  Axe shrugged, turned back to the bar.

  ‘No, really,’ the German man came over. ‘You have helped avoid certain disaster.’

  ‘Es ist in ordnung,’ Axe said. It’s okay.

  The big German smiled. Axe saw crooked teeth, a bit like his own.

  The German man switched to English, clapped Axe on the shoulder. ‘May we buy you a drink?’

  Axe thought about it.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  CHAPTER 28

  Celine was sitting with her feet in the water, staring at the shards of afternoon light flickering against the sides of the pool, when she felt the soft trace of a tail running up the back of her arm. Jake the cat wandered by her, the perhaps accidental tail-flick his only acknowledgement of her presence, and took his place at the head of the pool like a swimmer warming himself up for the first plunge. She’d heard some cats simply preferred men, but the fact hadn’t taken away the sting of jealousy when she and Keeps arrived home and the beast greeted him by headbutting his shin, purring heavily.

  Keeps slid open the dining room doors and wandered out, barefoot, watching the screen of a phone Trinity had given him. Celine had her own new device that mirrored one given to Brassen. While the traitorous guard languished in his isolated cell at Pronghorn, he would be tasked with monitoring the chatlines connected to sites owned and run by The Camp, waiting for a response to his message about needing to talk. She, Keeps, Trinity and Brassen were all logged in to the message boards under the same account. If any messages came through, they would all see the exchange at once.

  Celine hadn’t waited around at Brassen’s trailer to watch the man being escorted again into custody. She thought letting him go back to his home, to taste and smell his former life while knowing that every part of it had been destroyed, was a cruel trick by Trinity. She’d let the man wander in the tomb of his past. Celine didn’t envy the night that lay ahead for her former friend and colleague. He would be lying on an inmate bunk, listening to the sounds of the prison around him, familiar sounds made somehow horrifyingly new and foreign, awakened from fitful dozes now and then by Trinity asking questions. Celine guessed she wouldn’t let Brassen sleep too long at any point, just for the pleasure of tormenting him.

  Back at Pronghorn, Celine, Keeps and Trinity had taken a table in the chow hall to plot their strategy with Brassen. Celine had scanned the printed faces of the inmates pinned to the petitions, a sea of scowls, many of them slashed with red marker. In the hours she sat there, only once had a woman in a sheriff’s deputy uniform walked up triumphantly and crossed off a face, causing a little tired cheer from others in the room. Celine knew that, like her, the men and women who had joined in the recovery effort could be presented with an almost complete wall of red crossed faces, but while the really dangerous ones were still out there, there would be no cause to celebrate. One rapist running free because of her inability to keep him contained was too many for Celine. One child molester. One spree killer. She wouldn’t feel safe or satisfied until they had all been put back where they belonged.

  She wore the unease now as she sat with her feet in the pool. ‘It’s been hours,’ Celine said to Keeps. ‘Anything on the line?’

  ‘Not so much as a nibble.’ Keeps sat beside her and slipped his feet into the water. Celine tapped the phone next to her, which was open to the message board where Brassen had left his note. Need to talk. Situation changed. Urgent.

  Keeps put down the phone he had been monitoring and took up his own device, flipping open the screen cover and hitting a news app.

  ‘You seen what your boy got up to today?’ he asked.

  ‘What? No. I got distracted. Why?’

  ‘Check this out,’ Keeps said.

  He opened an article. The header image was of John Kradle’s and Homer Carrington’s mugshots superimposed over a small blue house in a narrow street that was crowded with police cars and mobs of gawkers behind a police cordon.

  Three Dead in Police Shoot Out With Top Fugitives

  Celine snatched the phone away. She felt Keeps’s eyes on her.

  ‘The department stated that Kradle killed Carrington after the wanted serial killer murdered two as-yet unidentified Mesquite Police officers at a suburban house in Beaver Dam,’ Celine read. ‘Police said that body-cam footage from one of the fallen officers appears to show Kradle intervening when Carrington tried to turn his gun on two residents of the property—’

  ‘He’s looking like a solid guy,’ Keeps said. ‘While he’s on the lam, anyway. First he lets that abducted lady go. Now he’s diving in front of bullets to save women and children.’

  Celine held up a hand. ‘I’m not trying to find out what kind of guy he is now. I’m trying to find out what kind of guy he was when his family was killed.’

  ‘When are you gonna tell me why you care so much?’

  ‘Because me and this guy, we’ve had a . . . a thing, for the past five years,’ Celine said. ‘Just about from the first day he arrived at Pronghorn, Kradle has been . . . in my head. You know?’

  ‘No, I don’t know.’

  ‘Like . . .’ Celine struggled. ‘Okay, so I wasn’t very nice to him when he arrived. The moment he got there. I . . . I didn’t give him the best greeting.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Celine tapped her knees.

  ‘I knew he was coming,’ she said. ‘I’d been following the case on TV and I was disgusted, just like everyone was, I suppose. I was almost happy he got sent to Pronghorn. I made sure he got the worst cell. The worst mattress. I held back his dinner until it was stone cold, and I held back his commissary papers so he couldn’t order so much as a razor for three weeks. All that was before he even slept the night.’

  She let her mind go back, just for a moment, saw him being led in on that morning. She remembered being shocked at his bruised eye, his nose still pumping blood, the limp. She didn’t bother asking who had done whatever had been done to him. Child-killers either got a pummelling for their crimes in county jail or they got a rough ride between prisons from vengeful transport guards. She’d seen it many times. Celine remembered standing outside Kradle’s cell while he sat numbly on the mattress, staring at nothing.

  ‘I asked him if he needed to go to the infirmary,’ Celine said. ‘He said no. I kept needling him. Saying, like, “If you have internal bleeding and I come down the row in the morning and find you dead, that’s a problem. That’s my problem. So do you need to go to the infirmary or not?” He kept saying no, no, no. And maybe, you know . . . Maybe I should have realised this was a bad time for him. He’d just got to the place where he was going to rot for the rest of his life. He’s just been introduced to the walls. The four walls.’

  Keeps nodded knowingly.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I pushed him over the edge and he snapped,’ Celine said. ‘He leaped up and hit the bars at a hundred miles an hour and tried to grab me. It was what I wanted. I stuck him in the hole for a couple of days. From then it was, like, on. It was on between us. He came up from the hole with this mean loo
k in his eyes. It said, I’m going to get you. And I gave him that look right back.’

  ‘And did he get you?’ Keeps said.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Celine said. ‘Not right away. Nothing big. He just watched for a while. And before long he found something. He found out I hate it when people cluck.’

  ‘When they cluck?’

  Celine flicked her tongue off the roof of her mouth, making a hollow cluck sound.

  ‘Why do you hate that?’ Keeps laughed.

  ‘Because it’s annoying!’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘He sends a kite down the row asking inmates to do it while I’m around,’ Celine said. ‘Like, he actually gives out commissary as payment for people to do it.’

  ‘That’s hilarious.’

  ‘Everywhere I go it’s like, CLUCK!’ Celine said. ‘I’m putting my stuff in the control room and I hear CLUCK! I’m going to the bathroom and someone out in the hall goes CLUCK! I’m doing my rounds and all the inmates are going CLUCK! CLUCK! CLUCK!’

  ‘I like his game.’

  ‘He started everybody drinking from their mugs backwards.’ Celine shook her head ruefully. ‘Gripping the cup with the handle turned towards you.’

  ‘So, like, the handle is under your mouth?’ Keeps asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You hate that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s not – that’s not how you do it.’

  ‘Ha. I love it.’

  ‘It’s got a handle for a reason! Use the handle!’

  ‘I need to remember some of this stuff.’

  ‘One time,’ Celine said, ‘I was walking past his cell and he just said, “Thirty days.” I said, “Thirty days to what?” He just shrugged. So, next day, I’m coming past and he says, “Twenty-nine days.”’

  ‘A countdown,’ Keeps said. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Yeah, interesting,’ Celine said. ‘So I really ask him what he’s counting down to. I’m dead serious. He won’t budge. By the time it gets to twenty-seven days, I say, “All right, I’ve had enough of this”. I pull him from the cell, sit him down, do a formal questioning. I write a report for the warden. I brief all the staff. By twenty-one days, other inmates are in on it. And there are hours and minutes attached now. Like, there are nineteen days, seven hours and forty-one minutes left.’